Taylor Loops Against Her Better Judgement
by ScionofSecrets000
Summary: Scion is dead, the world is saved... and Taylor wakes up at the moment of her trigger event, like none of it had ever happened. Yep, this is another one of THOSE fics, inspired heavily by Worm Loops by gbear605, really a community project. This story will be a bit more serious, what with the canon and the continuity and such.
1. Taylor Loops Against Her Better Judgemen

_Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters, locations, themes, ideas, ingrained social taboos and assumptions, vocabulary, voice, or original content contained herein. My body, mind and soul belong to Wildbow. Someday, we will be together. I love you._

 _This is my 'take,' of sorts, on Worm Loops. A lot of people on here like to write about Taylor getting a second chance, and I find it more masturbatory and Mary Sue-ish than is to my liking. I'm not a comedy writer, really, so I'm going to try to take it a bit more seriously. Here we go._

* * *

The bullets were painful, I knew. Objectively, I _deduced_ they must be, but the pain was not mine. I couldn't see, probably because the front of my skull was blown open on the inside of my mask. Regardless, I shut my eyes as I keeled over onto the soft grass. The few bugs in my range slipped from my awareness just as the pain did, and I felt surprisingly light as the tension and pains I'd forgotten were there left my attention. And then, there was the silence.

It was the exact inverse of my experience with the Clairvoyant. My sphere of awareness was zero: there was nothing in 'front' of me or 'around' me, because 'front' and 'around' and 'me', even, didn't exist. The only thing I was aware of was my own mind, in a sense, and it was because of that that I noticed.

 _I-I'm healing. She healed me._

If anyone could lobotomize a person with bullets, Contessa could. The haze over my memories was gone. _Grue_ was the boy in the cabin, _Tattletale_ my very good friend who watched me as I… well. I could recover my anchors. Danny and Annette Hebert. The graveyard, my old house, I could remember the addresses.

 _M-Mom. Dad. I'm sorry._

I hadn't stuttered: the mental stutter had lifted with the haze, but I could hardly bear to even _think_ about my parents. Come to think of it, my emotions were a total mess: the paranoia and panic that Khepri felt had been replaced by elation at remembering my friend's faces, and then was tempered by remorse in remembering my parents. Now, it occurred to me, I'd made a choice before I'd been shot.

 _Life or Death._

I'd chosen death. Had Contessa given me life?

 _I don't feel alive._

It was true. Time had passed, and I had nothing to track its progress. Still I had no senses, no beating heart or pumping blood. Only a consciousness in an endless void. _Maybe this_ is _death,_ I thought. A purgatory, to sort through my choices before I went on to… wherever. _Not heaven. Not any kind of heaven I'd recognize._ But in a sense, I'd already made my choice, received my judgement. How much more at peace did I need to be, exactly?

I was mulling over my circumstances when I noticed a point in my awareness. No, I couldn't _see_ it, not when I couldn't see, but I was _aware_ that it was some distance away. Curious, I tried to move closer, only to discover I was fixed in place. Instead, I _pushed_ my very _focus_ into the point, and I realized it was moving. Writhing.

 _Crawling._

In an instant, my perception _bloomed,_ a thousand, a _million_ points lighting up all around me. My eyes snapped open, and the smell hit me like a flesh, _blood,_ shit and vomit. I moved my arms, and found them pinned, uselessly, to my side. I tried to breathe, and the rancid air nearly made me puke. The conclusion was obvious, but I fought to think of _any_ other explanation. _I'm not back there. That's impossible._

 _How the fuck did Contessa send me back in time?_

I was back in the locker. Considering it, I knew I wasn't in hell: barring some kind of elaborate setup (which was, admittedly, very possible), this was the _least_ of my traumatic moments. Small potatoes, really: no one's life at stake, no impossible calls to make, with long-standing repercussions. I forced myself to relax and slow my breathing. I'd get nowhere by flipping out like last time around.

Which left the question, of course, of what to do now? I wanted to get out _immediately,_ but should I be worried about changing things? If this is all real, what are the consequences for changing the past? Acting on the assumption that someone behind the curtain had used a trick or illusion on me would not help, nor would assuming I was in an afterlife: without any ability to distinguish the truth from fiction, my guess would be only as good as a guess. All I could hope to do was the best I could for the present, ignoring ramifications for the moment.

What I wanted for the present? _Get me out of this fucking locker_.

Elsewhere in the building, Emma and Sophia had returned to their classes. Those _bitches._ Was it just that easy to them, to _torture_ someone like this? All the other students, who'd just _watched_. They weren't bullies: they were _worse,_ because any one of them could have told a _fucking_ teacher what they'd seen, and maybe I wouldn't have needed to go to the hospital. Like sheep, they huddled in groups in class or on their way, whispering. I could've listened in, but I knew there was nothing any of them could say that I would ever want to hear. Oh, I'm sure many of them would feel _horrible_ about what happened to poor Taylor. _Yeah, go ahead,_ feel _bad, while you do nothing, say nothing and keep your heads down. This will just work itself out that way, I'm sure._

When I'd first gotten my powers, the new stimulus was overwhelming, debilitating, _maddening_. Now? I used my power like I used my own limbs. I noticed, as I called every bug in the school to action, that my range remained what it was just before Panacea broke my power: about 10 city blocks. When I'd gotten out of the hospital, I'd tried to suppress my power, for fear of being found out; here, now, I knew exactly where I could move my bugs out of sight, because I had tagged every single person in the building, no-see-ums and mosquitos nestled in hair and folds of clothing. The _certainty_ I felt, the battlefield awareness, comforted me, made it almost easy to forget I was trapped in a festering heap of blood and cotton.

My bugs were acting before I had even time to consider my next move, spiders spooling thread, a team of flies using compound vision and touch to interpret where the numbers were on the combination lock on my locker door. I hoped they had used _my_ lock, which I had the combination for. It was on the door when I opened my locker; Sophia would have had to take it off and put a different one on in its place, and I hoped she hadn't seen the need to go that far. After all, she wouldn't expect me to open the lock from the _inside._

 _Fuck._ A teacher from a higher grade was coming down the stairwell to my right. Quickly, I stowed away my swarm, into nearby lockers and through cracks in the walls. I considered simply calling out to them, and potentially expediting my escape. Would it be best to just put aside my powers and trust the system? I didn't _want_ to relive the humiliation at the hospital, with my dad, with my teachers. But was it worth my pride, when I could do this the _right_ way, get help through legitimate channels?

I almost laughed at the thought. The system hadn't been my ally _before._ I had no reason to trust it _now._

He turned a corner, and my bugs flowed out of vents, joining threads into a strand 10 feet long, looping the center around the dial on the combination lock. I had the larger, stronger bugs positioned at the ends, like tug-of-war in miniature. At my command, they marched simultaneously right, then left, slowly rotating the lock. _0\. 23. 8._ The massed bugs then pulled in opposite directions, pulling the lock down towards the floor.

 _Click._

I stepped out of the locker, bugs and bloody tampons spilling out around me like a wave, and stumbled. My younger body's default slouch contrasted sharply with my own default, upright posture, and I didn't know how to hold myself as a result. There was nothing I wanted or needed from my locker, but I grabbed my backpack anyway, just in case. Bugs flowed over it, over _me,_ cleaning as best as they could: pulling away larger bits and devouring the rest. It wouldn't get the smell out, but I'd look more presentable to anyone with seriously poor vision or a good distance away. It was the best I could do.

I made my way out of the building, swaying on my feet a little as my stride fell _just_ short of where it expected to, my lower back complaining in response to being uncharacteristically straight. Bugs ferried the scraps of cotton to various bins all across the school, spreading out the waste so there wouldn't be too much nasty concentrated in any one place. I couldn't do too much about the _walls_ of my locker or the floor in front of it, couldn't _clean_ them, but a battalion of maggots working in concert worked tirelessly to tidy up the mess in neat rows. By the time the students returned to fill the halls, the swarm had retreated back into the earth and surrounding nature, my locker was back to normal but for a faint, rancid smell, and I was four blocks away, further than I really needed to be to catch a bus home. The bus arrived, I sank into my seat. I ignored the stares.

I shook. _What the hell is happening to me._

If only I knew then.

* * *

 _Please, PLEASE tear this fic apart. I want all your best criticisms. In fact, I would be satisfied if all of them were belong to us. Don't hesitate to PM me with questions, it's the best way to show me you DO care. That you love me, even. I need love._


	2. Mopey Taylor Takes a Shower

_Wow. I never expected such a huge response right off the bat, especially since Worm is so relatively obscure. I had my first review within hours of posting. I guess I'm really feeling the pressure to shart out more content, and quick. Some people mentioned the lack of shock Taylor felt from being plunged back in time. I hope this chapter addresses those concerns._

* * *

Sitting on the bus, reeking of vomit and blood, coming to terms with everything that had just happened to me… I felt worse, here, than I had when I woke up in the locker. There, I'd had a _mission_. A clear _enemy,_ a clear end goal. Now I had time to myself to think, and I felt dangerously close to unraveling.

 _Where to even start,_ I thought, staring down at my shaking hands. They didn't look like _my_ hands: there was a point when I wore gloves more often than not, and even out of costume my hands were _tougher. These_ hands were pale, almost pudgy compared to how lean my fingers used to be, and the scars and rough texture all were gone, not to form for years to come. I was sweating, and it felt sticky and unpleasant, not refreshing like it would become once I grew more athletic. In short, this younger body of mine felt totally foreign.

I remembered from my Parahuman Studies with the Wards about how the mental vs. physical time travel debate was resolved years ago, as capes with time travelling abilities became more prominent in the public eye. Time travelling worked by manifesting something, usually the time traveller, backwards through time in a physical space and then presumably collapsing the 'original' universe where the time traveler disappeared, leaving only the new, 'offshoot' universe created by the split in the timeline. Of course, we say 'presumably' because it's possible that those doomed universes still exist somewhere, where team-mates in dire straits looked to their time-travelling ally to change the past, only for the traveller to pop out of existence completely. It would make _this_ universe, where such a phenomena had never occurred in recorded history, astronomically unlikely.

And despite all that, I sat here, flying in the face of all the neat theories stuffy professors had dreamed up in their offices. Officially, 'mental time travel' was impossible, and anyone who _thought_ they could do it was a strange and powerful sort of precognitive. In reality, I saw at least three flaws with me being a precognitive: one, I already _had_ a power, albeit a crappy one: bug control. Two: my powers hadn't simply reverted to how they were when I had first triggered, which either meant that having an extended range was simply something I had _learned_ how to do, or that my power had hitched a ride with my memories back in time; I wasn't sure which option disturbed me more. Finally, and most importantly, _precogs couldn't see Scion._ I'd watched him through a thousand eyes, I'd _killed_ him, damnit. Any power that let someone learn this much about the entities _couldn't_ be a normal parahuman ability: this was precisely the sort of thing the built-in limitations on powers were supposed to prevent.

So, had I really travelled backwards in time? I was leaning towards _no._ There was no real _reason_ for it, outside of setting up some kind of awful fanfiction, especially since we'd _won_ against Scion. If the fight had gone south, I could _maybe_ imagine some tinkers making some time-travel bullets for Contessa to insert into my brain, as a last measure. But that was a completely stupid hypothesis, and there would be no reason at all to entrust the deranged, mute lunatic with the task of saving the human race. Come to think of it, if I was losing my mind as Khepri, why was I suddenly back to normal? If my 'mind' had really been transplanted into my younger body, why hadn't any of the _damage,_ whether from the insanity or from the bullets? But despite these issues with the theory, there was no other explanation for what I was going through. I was _here,_ this was _not_ an illusion or a memory, unless there was a cape who was powerful enough to set up something this elaborate but who _also_ didn't have any agenda for me. Hallucinating inside Echidna had a _point:_ I was supposed to be cowed into submission. Here, I was just confused and upset, but there was no booming voice from the sky with instructions.

I frowned. One cape came to mind. I _know_ I saw Sleeper on Zayin, reading that book. If anyone could deceive honest-to-goodness omniscience and an army of Thinkers, though, he could. But no, his power didn't quite work like this.

The bus turned a familiar corner, and I signalled to get off too late, getting off at the next stop instead. The bug population here was noticeably different than when I had left; in my brief stint as Skitter, Warlord of Brockton Bay, I'd made changes to the bug populations in the ecosystem, feeding the useless bugs to the fliers, spinners, and stingers of my swarm. In particular, there were drastically fewer black widows in the area, and I could have gathered them to me, started organizing my swarm, bulking out my forces and gathering silk. I could have, I _itched_ to, but if I _really_ had what I thought I had, a second chance? I would be playing this carefully. I would be taking any opportunity to avoid the spotlight and maneuver behind the scenes. The _enormous_ advantage I had in foreknowledge of the coming events would be completely squandered if I made my existence known, and this was part of why I'd left the school so discreetly. It was extremely unlikely for anyone to notice my bugs, but on the other hand, I wasn't planning on anything that would require lines of silk, swarm clones or even a costume, and I didn't need to spy on enemies when I knew what they were going to do next. At least, until I changed something major enough to go off-script.

So I left my bugs where they were, for the most part, and sent a single fruit fly ahead to trace out the hallways of my home, even knowing no one would be there. After spending so long with _near total_ awareness of everything and everyone in my power's range and a brief period of total omniscience, I simply _couldn't bear_ to walk into my own house without being _completely sure._ It _scared_ me how much I needed that control. And now, I was very aware of where that particular neurosis could lead. It was disquieting.

Even years later, after all I'd been through, I knew where to find my key, and produced it in the very same motion I'd made every afternoon for the past several years, chronologically speaking. It was funny how those little habits could stick with you like that. Stepping into my house, I was almost overcome with emotion: the few times I'd been back here since Leviathan, the damage had accumulated, structurally and _emotionally._ Dad had been forced to pawn things to pay for supplies, pictures had been shredded in their frames by Shatterbird's attack, and even after the house had work done in the windfall following the portal opening in Brockton Bay, it could never go back to how it was. Standing here, in my fifteen year old body, in my house as it _should_ be, I _felt_ like I was fifteen again.

It made everything I'd done feel just a bit further away, like it was all a crazy dream, and I'd finally woken up.

 _Can't let my guard down,_ I thought. This was precisely the kind of reaction someone would _want_ me to have, right before I discover my dad's mangled corpse in the next room. I couldn't think of any better way to break me, if that's what they were aiming for. But ascending the stairs, I heard them creak in all the same places; the shower still took a full minute to warm up, and stepping in, the water _felt_ the same. My towel was right where I'd left it. My bed, too, was waiting like no time had passed, and it _hadn't._ By the time I got there, I had all but forgotten my fears, and my dirty clothes discarded on the bathroom floor.

I slept deeply.

* * *

 _There are some that will worry about pacing, here, because it_ is _rather slow, but I feel that capturing her thought process right after her world is upended is all too often left out of these kinds of fics. The pace will pick up as she decides on her approach for this time around._

 _There is a trademark of good writing that I'm trying to work on: "show" not "tell". The 'mystery' of why Taylor covered up all the evidence is not something I should "tell" you as the author but rather "show" you through her character, but she has other things on her mind, and forcibly turning her train of thought to that topic could break suspension of disbelief; I tried to strike a balance, but in case that wasn't enough, I may return to that issue later, in other circumstances._

 _And with that, we're done. Keep on reviewing! I need to hear those thoughts! In particular, though, if you have a comment about the story in general, PM me and I'll try to have a discussion without getting defensive. :)_


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